Ancient Greece

Annaliese Baron
Ms. Erika Correa
Eo1 Literature SSR Essay
December 11, 2017
 My book is ‘Ancient Greece’ written by Anne Pearson. In the book, the author talks

about life in ancient Greece, including topics such as crafts, land expansion, how life was for

women, the clothes people wore, and gods and goddesses.

The purpose of the book is to inform people about ancient Greece, and how things used

to be back then. The focus is on how they lived their lives, their crafts and mythology, and how

some of their traditions, practices and ideas carried over to today’s society, such as the Olympics.

The central idea of the text is on how things used to be in Greece, and how they used to live,

though it varied between men and women. One of the themes is how our past affects the present.

One example of the development of this theme is carrying the torchlight in the Olympics. “A

runner carrying the Olympic flame at the Seoul Olympics of 1988. In the Athenian games, relay

races with torches took place after dark, and the winning team lit a fire on altars to Zeus of

Athena.” Another example is the system of democracy. It was a new form of government first

developed in Athens, and now is used in America, Canada, Switzerland and many more

countries today. In Greek, ‘democracy’ actually means ‘power of the people’, though women,

foreigners, and slaves didn’t have the chance to vote.

The book also goes into detail about different parts of life in ancient Greece, like

‘Growing up in Greece’, ‘Crafts, Travel, and Trade’, and ‘The Mycenaean Civilization’ to name

a few. Although there is no dialogue, as the book focuses more on culture as a whole, rather than

a single person or people, it does talk about gods, goddesses and heroes such as Herakles, a great

hero known for his strength, and being the son of Zeus. Because religion was so important to the

ancient Greeks, many temples were built to honor the gods. There, they made sacrifices to the

gods. Today, some architecture is inspired by the many temples built back then. The ancient

Greeks also contributed to our knowledge of science, medicine and math. Some examples of this
is the abacus which was used for equations. Anaxagoras, an astronomer, discovered that the

moon’s light is reflected from the sun. And finally, Hippocrates’ discovery that the human body

is a single organism, and that each part of the body could only be understood as a whole.

In my opinion, this is a good book to use if you want to learn about the rich culture of

ancient Greece. It goes into detail about many subjects, ranging from childhood to crafts,

mythology, and finally to death.